Free Speech For People, a national nonpartisan nonprofit organization founded in 2010 to fight for constitutional democracy, and the first national organization to call for Trump’s impeachment, applauds the Manhattan district attorney and grand jury for finally holding Trump to account in a court of law for one of his many violations of state and federal law, in this case for the corrupt purpose of misleading the people of the United States, and of New York state in particular, about secret financial payments he made to influence the 2016 election.

At the same time, Trump’s many other serious crimes have yet gone unpunished. In a February 18, 2021 letter that we led in issuing to then-Attorney General-Designate Merrick Garland (joined by over a dozen other public interest organizations), we argued that the U.S. Department of Justice should investigate Trump for multiple federal crimes: crimes related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and the events leading up to it; crimes related to Trump’s January 2, 2021 phone call demanding that the Georgia Secretary of State “find 11,780 votes”; crimes related to his 2016 hush money payments to his former mistresses; the obstruction of justice crimes identified by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the second part of his report; crimes identified by the inspector general of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence related to Trump’s attempts to extort Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky; and others. We called upon Garland to establish an independent DOJ task force to coordinate these investigations while insulating them from political interference.

Since then, DOJ has failed to pursue many of these criminal investigations. To be sure, DOJ (through a special counsel) does appear to be investigating Trump’s role in the January 6th insurrection and his more recent crimes related to theft of government documents and obstruction of justice at Mar-a-Lago. But on November 18, 2022, Garland publicly abandoned investigating Trump for any pre-2020 crimes. In fact, the Manhattan district attorney appears to have re-started the investigation that gave rise to today’s arraignment of the disgraced ex-president precisely when Garland abandoned investigating these earlier offenses.

The Department of Justice—and, to the extent that Trump committed state crimes in Georgia or elsewhere, state and local prosecutors in those jurisdictions—must rise to the occasion and ensure that no one, not even a former president, is above the law. Donald Trump must be held accountable for all of his crimes.